1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a mechanism for increasing customer satisfaction among users of any time-shared resources, such as contact centers or recreational, restaurant or lodging facilities, while reducing the likelihood that the customer will leave the system while waiting for service. More specifically, a system provides awards/rewards to a customer based on the waiting time, with at least one step in the process being automated.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many customers experience some “dis-utility” for waiting for service in a call center, and consequently balk from the system and/or do not call again, resulting in loss of goodwill and monetary losses. This is of particular importance when a call center handles sales, up-sell and cross-sell functions.
FIG. 1 exemplarily shows a typical time-shared resource environment 100, such as a contact center 101, wherein customer 102 interacts in some manner 103 with a service (e.g., using a telephone system). Contact center 101 exemplarily has two service representatives 104,105 currently on duty. It is common to experience dissatisfaction upon being placed on hold when all available service representatives are busy serving other customers. Similarly, it is common to experience dissatisfaction when forced to wait at a recreational, restaurant or lodging facility.
Thus, a need exists to reduce customer dissatisfaction during times of awaiting service, particularly in those environments where the service is discretionary to the customer, in the sense that the customer has alternatives to waiting for such service, either by going elsewhere or by substitution of the service by another service.
One obvious remedy to this problem is to reduce the waiting time by increasing the available resources. However, given the expense of increasing human labor resources, it may be more economical to offer incentives to the customer to wait rather than to increase the resources to handle customers more quickly.